Since there are two major SKU types for Power BI premium, and that there was (and is) a fair amount of confusion around this area, I also published another article attempting to clear up the confusion. While this article was based on all the information publicly available at the time, new information has pointed out that it is incorrect.

The two major SKU types are P and EM, with P standing for Premium and EM for Embedded. This matters significantly because the two SKU types have significantly different entry points and therefore costs.

The P SKU was the only one introduced when Premium was originally announced. It gives organizations the ability to place Power BI assets in a premium capacity container (a Power BI “app”), and once this is done, anyone can consume these assets whether or not they have a license.

Subsequent to this, an additional SK (EM) was introduced to address Power BI Embedded. Power BI embedded allows an ISV to use Power BI to add reports to their own applications. In this scenario, the reports run from the ISV’s tenant. Originally the assets were housed in Azure, but with the availability of Premium capacity, the decision was made to shift Power BI Embedded to use this new model. Given that the requirements of an ISV are not the same as a general organization, this new SKU was introduced. The EM SKU comes with a significantly lower entry point and cost, but also with significant restrictions. This is where the confusion sets in.

The wording around the restrictions on the EM SKU indicated that it could not be used for the SharePoint web part, and that a P SKU, or a Pro license would be required for that use case. This is where my earlier article is incorrect. I have since had conversations with the product team, and have been informed in no uncertain terms that the EM SKU CAN be used for both SharePoint web part, and Teams tab embedding of Power BI reports.

This is a very significant difference. An organization that is using Power BI casually, but has a few reports that they want to share with a broad audience was looking at a cost of almost $5,000 per month to do this. Given that the cost of a Pro license is $10/user/month, this meant that the organization needed to have at least 500 frequent report consumers before Premium was even worth considering. Also given the fact that the embedding features available in both SharePoint and Teams require that Pro or Premium SKU, this could be a real disincentive to its use. However, given that the EM SKU start at approximately $650/month for the entire organization, this becomes much more approachable, and it lowers the bar to entry significantly. This should result in significantly greater adoption of these Power BI embedding features, and consequently, of Power BI as a whole.

To be clear, there are still restrictions around the EM SKU. You cannot share Power BI apps with this SKU, but you CAN use it to embed reports in both SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.

8 thoughts on “Which Premium SKU is Needed to embed Power BI Reports in SharePoint and Microsoft Teams”

YES!! I just tested it on a Premium EM1 SKU, and it works.
A user without a Pro licence needs to be a member of the App Workspace, and voilà.
If the user is only member of the published “app” permission, it will not work.

John, I was listening in on these conversations and understood the same.

I would make a note that utilization of the EM SKU also limits Power BI mobile use (possible workarounds with SharePoint mobile configuration but much more overhead/configuration requirements) and removes other capabilities (i.e. quick insights, q&a, etc.).

But, it definitely adds an interesting option for small organizations not fully utilizing these features….much smaller barrier of entry.

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“The P SKU was the only one introduced when Premium was originally announced. It gives organizations the ability to place Power BI assets in a premium capacity container (a Power BI “app”), and once this is done, anyone can consume these assets whether or not they have a license.”

This is not true and should be changed. The consumption of any content in a workspace assigned to a Premium node requires a licence of some sort – free will do – but you need a licence. This also applies to SharePoint and Teams embedded webparts. In addition, when sharing, the target audience do NOT need to be members of the workspace.

Do the EM SKUs allow me to use “app owns data” and embed on my organization’s intranet instead of using Sharepoint or Teams, or am I still restricted to only “user owns data” if I’m embedding for internal use?

I am working on implementing an “user owns data” integration type within my application. That is, the users of my application have an Power BI user license (free or Pro) that is used when they navigate to my report embedding functionality.
Is it true that the EM SKU does not work for the “user owns data” embedding cases (the A SKU cannot, obviously, be used for this) and the single available options it either use a P SKU (and in this case the report consumers could have only free licenses) or have Power BI Pro user licenses for the report consumers?